Victorious couple pleases God and the holy angels and saints by returning to confession!

Through your influence both my husband and I went to confession today. First time in 19 years for me, 24 years for him. It was AMAZING. We had to do some searching to find somewhere with a traditional booth (we both prefer that) but we feel so fortunate to have had your guidance.

In my whole life, I’ve only ever seen my mother go to confession once (right before her marriage situation with my father was finally regularized, almost fourteen years ago). I am staying with my folks for Easter this year, and I told them that I wanted to go to the penance service on Holy Thursday. My mother went with me, and praise God, she got in the confession line too and went.

Now we just need to work on my father, who was baptized fourteen years ago but has NEVER been to confession. No one taught about it in his RCIA classes, and I cannot convince him that it’s important. He’s 74 now, and not in good health–please pray that he will understand this great sacrament before it is too late!

@ Janet C: I had a similar situation with my own parents. Growing up, my two sisters and I never saw them approach the confessional whenever we had to go (I remember how my heart would ‘thump’ with apprehension when Mom said to us on Saturday afternoon, ‘You’re going to confession today’….and boy, she meant it!). We never even had a second thought as to why they didn’t.
It wasn’t until I was in my early teens when Mom sat us girls down one evening before Christmas and told us that she had been married before [briefly] before she met Dad, and that she had to get an annulment before they could receive the sacraments again. The long-time pastor of our hometown parish (who baptized me and my sisters) was on the diocesan marriage tribunal, and he met with them for several Friday evenings to get all the details done.
My parents were able to go to confession and receive Communion for the first time [since they got married in the early 1950s] that Christmas Eve in the early 1970s. My mother shed tears of joy!
I don’t remember if my father ever went to confession after he became ill with Alzheimer’s in the early 1980s. But he did receive the Last Sacraments before he died.
Mom went to confession when she felt she needed it. She also received the Last Sacraments before she died eight years ago this month (on Divine Mercy Sunday).
But this post about the couple who went together is very heartening!

It’s hard to believe such a RCIA program could exist. Everyone responsible for it should be run off with a pitchfork (if not excommunicated). What did they teach, if not the sacraments–which distinguish us as Catholics?

Henry, unfortunately, it’s all too true…when I was in RCIA 13 years ago (West Coast, USA) it was “recommended” that we go to confession before Confirmation/1st Eucharist, but not required. No instructions were given. So…we didn’t go (my husband was a fallen away Catholic who was never confirmed, I a convert). They also didn’t say we needed to have our marriage (outside the Church) regularized, or my previous marriage annulled…just that we should “look into it.” None of that happened until several years later, through the prompting of the Holy Spirit…and the graces that poured out upon our marriage afterwards were astounding. I have often fought bitterness at those who thought they were being “sensitive & pastoral” in keeping these basic truths (& much needed graces!) from us.

Similar attitudes also prevailed in at least 3 other parishes we have since attended, where I’ve been involved in sacramental prep. Everyone is so afraid of offending anyone, they prefer to just leave them in their sin & ignorance.

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“This blog is like a fusion of the Baroque ‘salon’ with its well-tuned harpsichord around which polite society gathered for entertainment and edification and, on the other hand, a Wild West “saloon” with its out-of-tune piano and swinging doors, where everyone has a gun and something to say. Nevertheless, we try to point our discussions back to what it is to be Catholic in this increasingly difficult age, to love God, and how to get to heaven.” – Fr. Z

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"We as Catholics have not properly combated (the culture) because we have not been taught our Catholic Faith, especially in the depth needed to address these grave evils of our time. This is a failure of catechesis both of children and young people that has been going on for fifty years. It is being addressed, but it needs much more radical attention... What has also contributed greatly to the situation is an exaltation of the virtue of tolerance which is falsely seen as the virtue which governs all other virtues. In other words, we should tolerate other people in their immoral actions to the extent that we seem also to accept the moral wrong. Tolerance is a virtue, but it is certainly not the principal virtue; the principal virtue is charity... Charity means speaking the truth. I have encountered it (not speaking the truth) many times myself as a priest and bishop. It is something we simply need to address. There is far too much silence — people do not want to talk about it because the topic is not 'politically correct.' But we cannot be silent any longer."

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"Where priest and people together face the same way, what we have is a cosmic orientation and also in interpretation of the Eucharist in terms of resurrection and trinitarian theology. Hence it is also an interpretation in terms of parousia, a theology of hope, in which every Mass is an approach to the return of Christ."

"In those situations where homosexual unions have been legally recognized or have been given the legal status and rights belonging to marriage, clear and emphatic opposition is a duty. ... If all Catholics are obliged to oppose the legal recognition of homosexual unions, Catholic politicians are obliged to do so in a particular way, in keeping with their responsibility as politicians." CDF 2003

One of the most dangerous errors is that civilization is automatically bound to increase and spread. The lesson of history is the opposite; civilization is a rarity, attained with difficulty and easily lost. The normal state of humanity is barbarism, just as the normal surface of the planet is salt water. Land looms large in our imagination and civilization in history books, only because sea and savagery are to us less interesting.
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"Latin is a precise, essential language. It will be abandoned, not because it is unsuitable for the new requirements of progress, but because the new men will not be suitable for it. When the age of demagogues and charlatans begins, a language like Latin will no longer be useful, and any oaf will be able to give a speech in public and talk in such a way that he will not be kicked off the stage. The secret to this will consist in the fact that, by making use of words that are general, elusive, and sound good, he will be able to speak for an hour without saying anything. With Latin, this is impossible."

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Thee, O merciful God, that She, being
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“The legalization of the termination of pregnancy is none other than the authorization given to an adult, with the approval of an established law, to take the lives of children yet unborn and thus incapable of defending themselves. It is difficult to imagine a more unjust situation, and it is very difficult to speak of obsession in a matter such as this, where we are dealing with a fundamental imperative of every good conscience — the defense of the right to life of an innocent and defenseless human being.”

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"One of the most dangerous errors is that civilization is automatically bound to increase and spread. The lesson of history is the opposite; civilization is a rarity, attained with difficulty and easily lost. The normal state of humanity is barbarism, just as the normal surface of the planet is salt water. Land looms large in our imagination and civilization in history books, only because sea and savagery are to us less interesting."

- C.S. Lewis

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“I expect to die in bed, my successor will die in prison and his successor will die a martyr in the public square. His successor will pick up the shards of a ruined society and slowly help rebuild civilization, as the church has done so often in human history.”

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Charles Pierre PéguyNotre Patrie, 1905

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St. Gregory Nazianzus
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“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”

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“Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites. . . . Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.”

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